[Spooks] Text for Numbers Station Article
Tom Norris
r390a at bellsouth.net
Tue Aug 3 18:14:51 EDT 2004
In violation of all US and foreign copyright laws, here is the
text of that article with source properly attributed.
TN
washingtonpost.com >Arts & Living >Music
The Shortwave And the Calling
For Akin Fernandez, Cryptic Messages Became Music To His Ears
By David Segal
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, August 3, 2004; Page C01
In a cluttered home office in the World's End section of London, Akin
Fernandez is trolling the dial of his newly acquired shortwave radio.
It's December 1992 and it's late at night, when the city is quiet and
the mad-scientist squawks of international broadcasts have an
otherworldly tone. Fernandez, the owner and sole employee of an indie
music label, is about to trip across a mystery that will take over
his life.
Shortwave signals are bouncing, as they always do, around the globe,
caroming off a layer of the atmosphere a few hundred miles above the
Earth and into antennas all over the world. Fernandez can hear news
from Egypt and weather reports from China. But his browsing stops
when he tunes in something startling: the mechanized voice of a man,
reading out numbers.
No context, no comment, no station identification. Nothing but
numbers, over and over, for minutes on end. Then the signals
disappear, as if somebody pulled the plug in the studio. And it's not
just one station. The more he listens, the more number monologues he
hears.
"Five four zero," goes a typical broadcast, this time in the soulless
voice of a woman with a British accent. "Zero nine zero. One four.
Zero nine zero one four."
Numbers in Spanish, in German, Russian, Czech; some voices male,
others female. When Fernandez lucks into hearing the start of a
broadcast, he's treated to the sound of electronic beeps, or a few
bars of calliope music, or words like "message message message." Then
come the numbers. A few stations spring to life the same time each
night, others pop up at random and cannot be found again.
At first, Fernandez figures it's a prank, the work of radio pirates
with a sense of humor. But you need a license for this part of the
radio band, and why would anyone break the law just to read digits
into the dark yonder? In England the penalties are serious. Where's
the comedic payoff?
Nobody has answers. Not the guy who sold him the radio, who claims
they're weather stations -- which is crazy, because weather stations
don't hopscotch to different spots on the dial, as many of these did.
Not a manual he buys about shortwave frequencies, which has a chapter
on "numbers stations" and describes them as a riddle that nobody has
solved. Not the British Library, which seems to have catalogued every
other sound on the planet.
What's with the numbers?
Answering that question, it turns out, would take Fernandez years,
and it left him nearly penniless, at least for a while. It also
brought him a horde of admirers on another continent, eventually
earned him a credit in a Tom Cruise movie and sparked a legal battle
with the acclaimed band Wilco.
Fernandez would study numbers stations largely because he couldn't
stop even if he tried -- which is to say, he fell into the grip of an
obsession. But along the way, by both accident and design, he
discovered amid all that static the raw material for a point he likes
to make, with characteristic zeal, about the future of rock-and-roll.
That, however, is later. In December of '92, Fernandez is just
listening. And listening. He stays up till 4 or 5 every morning,
jotting down frequencies and figures, looking for patterns. He keeps
a detailed log, not for weeks or months but for years, without a clue
about what exactly he is logging. Sometimes Fernandez doesn't leave
his house for a week.
"You just get submerged," he says, on the phone from London. "You get
immersed in it. There are so many questions and the only answer is to
listen more, because no answers are coming from anywhere else."
The Secret Sounds
A few things you should probably know about Akin Fernandez: There's
the basic background stuff -- that he's the son of Nigerian-born
parents, that he grew up in Brooklyn and moved to London when he was
15 years old. He calls himself a geek. He believes UFOs are real.
More mysteriously, there appear to be grooves carved into his
clean-shaven head, the origins of which he politely declines to
discuss. ("Irrelevant," he says.) He is now 41.
Also -- and this is key -- Fernandez hunts for audible thrills the
way a shark hunts for meat, which is to say constantly and
ravenously. This makes it a little easier to grasp his passion for
numbers stations. They were unlike anything that had ever hit his
ears.
And the radio counting wasn't just new to Fernandez, it was
beautiful. He's a disciple of an Italian named Luigi Russolo, who
argued in a 1913 manifesto called "The Art of Noises" that the bustle
of city life and industrial machinery ought to be included in our
musical language, alongside chords and harmonies, violins and oboes.
This proved a tough sell. In 1914, Russolo held his first concert
with noise-making machines he called Intoners and the show ended in a
melee: performers against the audience.
"I understand that shortwave noise is a kind of music," Fernandez
says, sounding Russolovian. "And to me the numbers brought another
level of beauty to the music."
One final thing to know about Akin Fernandez: He's prone to
fixations. His first was a collection of Marvel comic books that
swelled to 5,000 when he was a kid. In his twenties, he noticed that
literary-minded prostitutes in London were advertising their
services, and phone numbers, with saucy little poems written on cards
glued to the insides of phone booths. ("Once upon a time in Earl's
Court / reigned the wicked Love Queen . . . ") For months, Fernandez
would mortify friends and family by painstakingly peeling the cards
off the glass, until he owned more than 600 of them. In 1984, he
published the lot in a volume called "The X Directory."
"My mother came to the book party," Fernandez recalls. "I couldn't believe it."
Numbers stations, with their variety and quantity, triggered all of
his impulses to catalogue and collect. The stations had personality,
if you listened long enough. One always began with a few bars of "The
Lincolnshire Poacher," an old British folk song. On another you could
occasionally hear roosters or echoes of Radio Havana in the
background, as though someone had forgotten to turn off a mike. One
starred a young lady with an exotic accent who dramatically read
words from the International Radio Operators alphabet, somehow making
inscrutable phrases -- "Sierra. Yankee. November." -- sound
life-and-death urgent.
While the rest of London slept, Fernandez chased these voices all
over the dial, never sure when or where he'd find one. He wrote down
the results in a green book bound with fake leather. A typical entry
looked like this:
Sept 6 '93
Freq Time Signal
6.201 USB 12:30 am BIZARRE German Children's Voice
Station starts with beeps, then
GLOCKENSPIEL!! Then count
From 1 to 10 then ACHTUNG!
And message!! [expletive] Hell!!
There are a lot of exclamation points in Fernandez's log.
"You're listening, and all of a sudden you come across a really
strong signal," he says. "It's the most chilling thing you've ever
heard in your life. These signals are going everywhere and they could
be for anything. There's nothing like it."
To pay the rent, Fernandez released music through Irdial-Discs, which
by then was part of a small ecosystem of clubs and record shops
selling avant-garde music in London. Finally, after three years of
wee-hours number logging, he heard about a book called "Intercepting
Numbers Stations" by a guy named Langley Piece. He mail-ordered it
from a place in Scotland, and when it arrived he sat and devoured it
in a sitting. The book confirmed Fernandez's initial hunch -- the
stations were no joke.
"They're deadly serious, in fact," he says. "That little German girl
reading numbers, she might be ordering someone to assassinate a
person with a poisoned umbrella."
Mission: Indecipherable
Let's say you're a spy, out in the field, spying. You need
instructions now and then from headquarters, but you don't want to
risk exposure by picking up a phone (tappable) or getting an e-mail
(traceable). Face-to-face meetings carry their own risks. What do you
do?
One solution, dreamed up during the Cold War: Listen on shortwave
radio at a predetermined time and frequency for a message that only
you can understand. Numbers stations, it turns out, are the one-way
chatter of espionage agencies to their spies. This isn't conspiracy
theory hokum; it's referenced in a dozen-plus memoirs of assorted
ex-spooks and defectors. And though numbers broadcasts might sound
low-tech in the age of the BlackBerry, the idea isn't utterly
cockamamie.
"In a two-way communication, you have to acknowledge the message,"
says David Kahn, author of "The Codebreakers," a history of
cryptology. "But with a shortwave broadcast, anybody can listen,
which means that nobody knows who the message is intended for."
The numbers, Kahn explained, are translated with the aid of what's
known as a one-time pad, essentially a dictionary for a language that
is spoken only once. Most pads are destroyed after a single use --
some of the Soviet pads, lore has it, were edible -- making them one
of espionage's rarest artifacts. In 1988, three were found in a bar
of hollowed-out soap when a Czech spy, posing as an art dealer in
London, was caught by authorities as he sat in an apartment and
transcribed a message sent via shortwave.
For Fernandez, this spy angle was a red rag to a bull. A dozen new
questions arose, such as how much was all this costing taxpayers, and
what messages were being sent? It irked him, too, that no government
official, at least in Britain or the United States, would acknowledge
this whole system was in place. He was unmoved by the argument that
if the system were acknowledged it wouldn't be secret anymore. It
didn't matter to him that the messages were totally indecipherable,
or that nobody else seemed remotely worked up about them. The more
Fernandez thought about it, the more outrageous it all seemed.
British citizens -- and citizens of other countries -- underwriting
secret messages, sent to agents, telling them to do God knows what.
"Even if you assume that most of the messages are 'pick up this
money' or 'drop off the laundry,' think about what numbers stations
represent. The only way a secret like this can be kept is if you live
in a society where everybody is obeying and everybody is a little
sleepy. But if you're a curious kind of chap you'll wonder, if your
government can keep this a secret, what other secrets are they
keeping."
If you knew Fernandez back in 1994, there was no talking him out of
his numbers addiction. He claims he had a social life through his
super-fixated years, but ask for the name of a buddy who knew what he
was going through and he comes up empty.
Well, a girlfriend named Anne Marie came by one night and listened
and her jaw dropped. More typical, though, was the reaction of a
cousin who lives in London, who was perfectly baffled.
"I'd call and he'd say, 'I'm listening to something, do you want to
hear it?' " remembers Enitan Abayomi. "And then I'd hear a voice over
the radio. And I'd think, so? I just didn't hear what he heard in it.
But he's very, very bright, and I often feel like he's leaving me
miles behind. So I thought that people with higher IQs than mine
might understand what he's talking about."
At some point, Fernandez began to think he'd never kick his numbers
habit. It had pushed nearly everything else out of his life. He'd had
enough, and in 1997, he tore himself, at last, from his radio. How
did he do it?
"The Conet Project," he says.
The Leading Edge of Rock
In the annals of recorded music, you'd be hard-pressed to find
anything rivaling the ambition and absurdity of "The Conet Project."
( Conet, a word he heard often on the shortwave, is Czech for "end.")
Four CDs with 150 different broadcast snippets from all over the
world. More than 280 minutes of white noise, numbers and beeps. Plus
a 74-page booklet with background, logs, playlists and a bibliography
-- the sort of treatment ordinarily reserved for platinum-selling
bands with a massive fan base. Fernandez poured everything he had
into "Conet." It sold in the United States for $62.
"I wanted it to be perfect," he says. "I didn't know what it would
do, if it would just sit in boxes, because nobody had done anything
like this before. But it was obvious to me that it had to be done."
This is a pretty succinct definition of obsession: a thing you feel
you have to do, even though you don't, even if doing it will cost you
everything, which is what it cost Fernandez. There were a few
head-scratching reviews of "Conet" and sales of about 2,000 copies,
modest even by indie standards. Fernandez closed up Irdial, and the
last pressing of "Conet" was in 2001. He took a series of jobs that
he'd rather not discuss.
"They were jobs," he says. "Just jobs."
That might have been it. But something happened. "Conet" slowly
acquired a cult following. A fervent cluster of devotees cropped up
in San Francisco, around a store called Aquarius Records, a haven for
the musical avant-garde, the sort of place that crows about albums
such as "Insect Electronica From Southeast Asia." To Aquarius's
owners and regular customers, "Conet" was a little ridiculous and
totally irresistible. They posted a chart behind the cash register
that tracked the store's "Conet" sales, and asked everyone who bought
a copy to pose for a photo. They stopped with a photo of customer No.
386.
"It works in a lot of different ways," says Allan Horrocks, a
co-owner of the store. "It's kind of creepy and mysterious because of
what it is -- this secret thing that you can't understand. We'd think
it was cool if it was just an experimental drone record. But it's
more than that."
Much more, actually. "Conet" gives off a whiff of the vaguely
forbidden: Maybe the government doesn't want you to hear this . And
your parents won't get it. And if you listen today, in the age of
Code Orange, it actually sounds a little sinister, with echoes of the
"chatter" the Bush administration is always warning us about. What
could be more frightening than "chatter"?
"Conet," in other words, delivers a couple of the slightly subversive
thrills that rock could once deliver without breaking a sweat. It
feels new, a little dangerous, a ticket into a subculture of sorts.
That's an experience you don't find in record stores much anymore, in
part because rock has been around for 50 years -- and can anything
that old really feel dangerous? -- and in part because corporate
America long ago figured out there's gold in the underground, and now
mines and mass-produces it faster every year. In a way, "Conet" is a
measure of just how fringeward you need to head these days to find
something that delivers the frisson of the margins.
Which is part of Fernandez's point. From the beginning, his label
released what he calls "fine art noise" and "underground dance
music," all of it made by a batch of artists you will never see on
the charts. To Fernandez, Irdial's niche product occupies some of the
only fertile ground left in music. It's his heartfelt belief that
rock-and-roll has been dead for years.
"Rock bands now are just following the path that's already been
marked," he grumbles. "Right down to the riffs, right down to the
production. These people are copying their fathers' record
collections.
"I think the truly creative people have left this area. A real artist
would look at the canvas and find the corner that hasn't been painted
yet. Nobody is doing that. . . . The first thing that anyone in a
band with a guitar and drums should do is put down their instruments."
So what's a rock band to do if it wants to keep the guitars and churn
new ground? How do you make something so familiar seem daring?
Enter Wilco, a quintet that started as an alt-country act and is now
boldly going where no rockers have gone before. Two years ago the
group released an album with a song called "Poor Places." It starts
as a droopy ballad, but eventually the drums fade, the melody
evaporates, and up roars a truly terrifying hurricane of sound. As it
builds to a climax, a woman's urgent semaphore peeks through the
noise:
"Yankee. Hotel. Foxtrot. Yankee. Hotel. Foxtrot. Yankee. Hotel. Foxtrot."
It's a track from "Conet," the voice of Ms. International Radio
Operator herself. The band sampled it and used it to name the album.
"Yankee Hotel Foxtrot" would earn Wilco its strongest reviews ever --
it was No. 1 that year in the Village Voice national poll of music
critics -- and it sold decently, too.
At various moments on "Yankee" you can hear lead singer and
co-songwriter Jeff Tweedy struggling with the where-do-we-go-now
question. And he finds an answer, or at least part of an answer, in
the same place as Fernandez, way way out there, in the ionosphere.
Which is apparently where you wind up now when you seek the unpainted
corner of the musical canvas.
It's enough to make you think that what's left of rock's frontier
isn't very pretty; there isn't even music playing there. At some
point -- after punk crested, perhaps, in the late '70s -- innovation
in guitar pop became a matter of creative arithmetic. Blind Willie
McTell plus Led Zeppelin times garage rock equals the White Stripes.
The Velvet Underground plus the Cars divided by an intercom system
equals the Strokes. But this has limits, too. The Strokes' second
album, "Room on Fire," is just a rehash of their first. It's
redundant and kind of gutless. It's everything that Fernandez hates.
"Conet" ultimately defines the crux of rock's problem in middle age.
How do you double back without seeming timid? How do you roll forward
without seeming incomprehensible for its own sake?
On the Record
Though Fernandez and Wilco might sound like kindred spirits, they
never exactly cozied up. The band didn't pay for that "Conet" loop,
and in 2002 Fernandez sued.
For years, it's been Irdial's policy to post free downloadable
versions of every song in its catalogue. (Head to Irdial.com to
download any Irdial title, including the entirety of "Conet.") But
Fernandez makes a distinction between personal and commercial use of
his work. If you're going to make money from his labors, he thinks he
should share in the wealth. At minimum, he thinks you should ask
nicely. In 2001, he granted Hollywood director Cameron Crowe the
right to several "Conet" cuts for use in the film "Vanilla Sky," free
of charge, because Crowe requested permission. The cuts are heard in
those arresting moments when Tom Cruise shows up in Times Square and
discovers that he's all alone.
Wilco, the band's lawyers would eventually explain, figured there was
no copyright on sound that anyone could have heard on the radio, that
obviously wasn't a song and that hadn't in any way been artistically
altered. Whatever the merits of the case -- and Fernandez says the
law in England is clearly on his side -- Wilco settled out of court,
saying it preferred to skip a drawn-out fight. That was in late June.
The band's label sent Irdial-Discs, aka Akin Fernandez, about $30,000
to cover his legal costs, plus a royalty payment several times that
sum. See if you can guess what Fernandez did with the money.
Today he is married, to Anne Marie, the one person who seemed to
grasp the lunacy and charm of numbers stations, and they are raising
four children. Some family men might take a windfall like the Wilco
loot and renovate the house, or take the kids on vacation. Fernandez
didn't do that.
"The kind of guy who releases 'The Conet Project' isn't the kind of
guy who goes on vacation," he says.
How about a new car?
"Absolutely not," he says.
Fernandez revived Irdial with the money, and he re-released "The
Conet Project." New copies went on sale July 13 and the sales chart
at Aquarius Records is back in action. In just a few weeks, the store
has already sold 120 more copies.
"Conet," of course, will never earn a profit, but that was never the
point. Fernandez calls it a total artistic triumph because it's in
the Library of Congress, because it's in the British Library and
because numbers stations are less of a mystery than when he first ran
into them, 12 years ago. In 1998, a U.K. government spokesperson
acknowledged for the first time that shortwave radio is indeed used
for espionage.
"These [numbers stations] are what you suppose they are," the
spokesperson told the Daily Telegraph, in a story that was prompted
by the release of "Conet." "People shouldn't be mystified by them.
They're not, shall we say, for public consumption."
To the untrained ear this might have sounded like an unremarkable
brushoff. To Fernandez, it sounded a lot like "uncle."
© 2004 The Washington Post Company
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